FATIGUE Jans Brody

Fatigue is one of the common complaints brought to' doctors and relatives. Witness these typical complaints:

"It, doesn’t seem to matter how long I sleep — I am more ti-red when I wake up than when I went to bed,"

"Some of my friends come home completely exhausted at the end of a day at the office."

"I thought I was weary because of the holidays, but now that they are over, I am even worse, I wonder if I am anemic or some-thing."

Kinds of Fatigue

There are three main categories of fatigue. These are phy-sical fatigue, pathological fatigue, and psychological fatigue.

PHYSICAL. Physical fatigue is usually a pleasant tiredness, such as that, which you might experience after playing a hard set of tennis, chopping wood, or climbing a mountain. The cure is si-mple and fast. You rest, giving your body a chance to get rid of accumulated wastes and restore muscle fuel.

PATHOLOGICAL. Fatigue is a warning sign or consequence of some underlying physical disorder, perhaps common cold or flu or something more serious like diabetes or cancer.

Even though illness is not a frequent cause of prolonged fatigue, its very important, that it not be overlooked. Therefore, anyone who feels drained of energy for weeks on snd should have a thorough physical checkup.

PSYCHOLOGICAL. Emotional problems and conflicts, especially depression and anxiety, are by far the most common causes of pro-longed fatigue.

Understanding the underlying emotional problem is the cru-cial first step toward curing psychological fatigue and by itself often results in considerable lessening of the tiredness. Profes-sional psychological help or career or marriage counseling may be needed.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

Does the writer use classification of fatigue?

2. How can you cure physical fatigue?

3. How does pathological fatigue act?

4. What is the crucial step toward curing psychological fatigue ?

WRITING ASSIGNMKNTS

1. Write an essay in which you identify and describe at least

three activities that would cause physical fatigue.

2. Kveryone feels bored now and again. Write an essay in which

you classify ths types of situations that make you bored. De-scribe each type to show why it is boring.

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SILENCE Seril Markham

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is a silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may' be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may nave been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood of the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo,

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Pick two or three of the silences the writer describes and, in your own words, explain now they differ from one another.

2. What does the writer mean by "silence"? 3. What is it that gives silences their different qualities?

WRITING ASSIGNHENTS

1. In a paragraph, classify or divide the qualities or types

of some abstract concept, such as life, truth, courage, be-auty, hate, fear, or greed, If you can, choose examples from s your own experience to include in ynur classifica*ion or di-vision.

Z. Write a paragraph classifying the sounds you hear during a

routine day.

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THE VANDAL AND THE SPORTSMAN Josef Wood Krutch

Most wicked deeds are done because the doer proposes some good to himself. The liar lies to gain some end; the swindler and thief want things which, if honestly got, might be good in themselves. Even the murderer may be removing an impediment to normal desires or gaining possession of something which his vic-tim keeps from him. None of these usually does evil for evil's sake .They are selfish or unscrupulous, but their deeds are not gratuitously evil. The killer for sport has no such comprehensible motive. He prefers death to life, darkness to light. He gets nothing except the satisfaction of saying, "Something which wan-ted to live is dead.' There is that, much less vitality, conscious-ness, and, perhaps, joy in the universe. I am the Spirit that De-nies." When a man want only destroys one of the works of man of God we call him Sportsman.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

l. According to the author, is the person who hunts animals for pure sport worse than a liar or murderer?

2. According to the author, why is it worse to destroy a helpless animal "legally" than to rob a bank or to vandalize a park '?

3. In your own words, state the motive of the killer for sport.

WRITING ASSIGNHENTS

1. Write a yersuasive paragraph in which you try to convince

your reader that one of the i'ollowing is "evil": gun control

laws or the absence of such laws, our yresent nuclear arms

yolicy, foo*ball in our society, killing or trayping wild

animals for their fur, or driving while intoxicated.

2. Proponents of hunting argue that in many cases it is an es-sential form of population control for wild species, and they

cite many ot.her yositive &ualities of the sport. Write a yer-sdasive paragraph refuting Krutch's statements about the atti-tude of hunters and the nature of hunting.

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ON BKING UNEMPLOYED

Nelliejean Smith fStudent)

Being unemployed creates many problems for many families and me. First of all, there are financial problems. We have cut back on the quality of groceries me purchase. There is al-so less money for clothing. Dresses must be altered and made into blouses; pants make nice skirts after some alteration. I have two more very sticky problems. I have fallen behind in the rental payments for our apartment, and now I am experien-cing difficulties trying to pay the back-rent. The other sti-cky problem is my son's, tuition payments, There does not seem to be any way that I can send a compete payment to his colle-ge. These are not the only problems I face. I also have psycho-logical problems as "a' result of unemployment. Often I wonder why this has happened to me. Then depression and confusion take over, and I feel drained of my abilities. The one question that fills my mind more often is the following: Why can't I get employment? This question evokes in me a lack of self-co-nfidence and self-worth. I am haunted by an overall feeling pf uselessness.. My other problems center on trying to cope with bureaucracy of the Employment Bureau. Once I get to the Emplo-yment Bureau, I stand in the line to sign up. I then wait in another line to which I must report. Once I go through all of this, I am sent out for job interviews,' only to find that the employer wants someone with more experience. To top everything off, I had to wait almost six months to receive my first unem-ployment check. As you can see, there is often a frustratingly long delay in receiving benefits. My family and I have suffered through many problems because of my unemployment.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. What do you think makes the 'inability to pay rent and her son's tuition particularly "sticky" problems for the writer '?

2. What makes the writer feel "drained of her abilities?

3. What psychological effects do you think the writer's unsuc-cessful job interviews have on her?

WRITING ASSIGNMKNTS

l. Write&a.,qause-and-effect paragraph or essay in which you in-dicate some&the social effects of unemployment.

2. Although being bneyployed has more positive than negative ef-fects, work does ha0e .effects that may not, always be pleasant.

Write a paragraph on how''w paricular jnb or certain types of

jobs can have negative effects.

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'FRIENDS, GOOD FRIENDS — AND SUCH GOOD Friends

Judith Uiorst

Consider these varieties of friendship:

1. CONVENIENCK FRIENDS. Convenience friends are convenient in-deed. They will lend us their cups for a party. They will dri-ve us to soccer. They will even take our cats when we go on va-cation. As we will for them. But we don’t, with convenient fri-ends, even come too close or tell too much:"- 2.SPKCIAL-INTKREST FRIENDS, These friendships are not intimate, and they need not involve silverware or cats. Their value lies in some interest jointly shared. And so we may have a college friend or a tennis friend or a friend from any club.

3. HISTORICAL FRIKNDS. We all have a friend who knew us when we were in our second grade. There is simply no other friend who remembers those things.

4, CROSSROADS FRIENDS, Like historical friends, our crossro-ads friends are important for what was — for the friendship we shared at a crucial, now past, time or life. A time, perhaps, when we roomed in a college together; or worked as eager young singles in the Big City; or went, somewhere.

5, CROSS-GKNERATIONAI FRIKNDS. This kind of intimacy exists in the friendships that form across generations in what one woman calls her daughter-mother and her mother-daughter relationships.

6. There are medium friends, and pretty good friends, indeed, and these friendships are defined by their level of intimacy.

7. The best of friends, I still believe, totally love and sup-port and trust each other, and bare to each other the secrets of their souls, and run — no questions asked — to help each other, and tell harsh truths to each other when they must be told.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1, How many kinds of friends does the author identify?

2. Explain in your own words what the author means in her descrip-tion of different kinds of friends

3. Why do you think the author uses the order she does in discus-sing different kinds of friends? What is the order that she uses — time, space, or importance ?

WRITING ASSIGNNENTS

1. Classify some of the people you know based on some category—

perhaps study methods, sense of humor (or lack of it), taste

in clothes, or levels of physical fitness, Use examples to cla-rify your own classifications,

2. Classify at least three types of music that you and your fri-ends listen to. Use desemiption to explain your classificati-ons.

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THE NATURAL SUPERIORITY OF WOMEN Ashley Montagu

Physically and psychically women are by far the superior of men. The old chestnut about women being more emotional than men has been forever destroyed by the facts of two great wars. Women under blockade, heavy bombardment, concentration camp confine-ment, and similar rigors withstand them vastly more successfully than men. Because of their greater size and weight, men are phy-sically more powerful than women — which is not the same thing as saying that they are stronger. A man of the same size and weight as a woman of comparable background and occupational status would probably not be any more powerful than a woman. As far as consti-tutional strength is concerned, women axe stronger than men. Many diseases from which men suffer can be shown to be largely influ-enced by their relation to the male Y-chromosome. More males die than females. Deaths from almost all causes are more frequent in males of all ages. Though women are more frequently ill than men, they recover from illnesses more easily and more frequently than men.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Why do you think the writer states that men are not stronger than women, even though they are physically more powerful? 2. What influences many of the diseases from which men suffer?

WRITING ASSIGNMENTS

1. Think of one male friend and female friend. Which do you think

is stronger ? Why '?

2. Is there someone with whom you are often compared, such as a

sistex', a brother, or a friend ? Are the similarities super-ficial, or are you xeally alike 7 How are you different

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